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With Donald Trump flailing in the wake of his disastrous debate performance Monday, his Alt-Right superfans are turning on each other.

Hitlerphile Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has launched what’s he’s calling “a Holy Crusade” against the most famous fanboy of the Alt-Right, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Anglin considers a “kike infiltrator and co-opter” of the Alt-Right and “the single greatest threat our movement has at this time.”

The aim of the boycott is to deprive Breitbart of the “significant portion of their traffic” that comes from Alt-Rightists. The aim of the campus confrontations is to put Milo on the defensive by asking him questions he’d rather not answer. And, not incidentally, to scare the hell out of him.

“He will … be in a state of constant fear when he knows that real Nazis are going to show-up at every show and confront him,” Anglin wrote. “[T]here is nowhere to run.”

While Milo himself has yet to publicly respond to Anglin’s “crusade,” as far as I know, everybody’s favorite racist fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale has launched a counterattack of sorts, denouncing Anglin and his allies as #AltRetards, a teensy tiny group of confused malcontents who are no more than “the flea on the tip of the tail” of the true Alt Right.

want anything to do with them, their finger-painting, or their swastika panties. The Alt-Retard is the idiot branch of the Alt-White, which unfortunately does make them part of the Alt-Right despite their ideological incoherency, but then, every village needs its idiot.

As best as I can tell from Beale’s post today, his master plan to defeat the “Alt Retards” is … to call them “Alt Retards.”

“They want to babble about branding,” he declares, “well, they’ve just been branded.”

The enmity between Milo and the Daily Stormer isn’t new. Milo fired the first shot in the war in March when he and fellow Breitbarter Allum Bokhari wrote a 5000 word apologia for the Alt Right that, as I put it at the time, “celebrated the can-do spirit of the proudly racist and anti-Semitic alt-right and tried … to pretend that the virulently racist movement’s virulent racism was all a big goof.” All those angry dudes endlessly shitposting about “kebabs” and “dindus?” Just lovable scamps trying to get a rise out of the world’s grouchy Guses.

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. …

Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.

Oh sure, the two admitted, there are some real Nazis in the Alt Right, but

there’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.

To Anglin, them’s fightin’ words. He replied with a blunt tirade denouncing Milo as a “homosexualist half-Jew” and warning his readers that

Any attempt to downplay the Jew role in the destruction of Western civilization should be looked at as subversion.

This Breitbart article is the first large-scale attempt to co-opt the movement and remove the Jews. … Probably, they’ve been awarded this task by other Jews.

The Jews have their schemes.

But we also have schemes.

Anglin and his fans do indeed.

UPDATE: Breitbart says that a Milo event has been cancelled due to death threats. It’s not clear if they’re related to The Daily Stormer’s “crusade” or not.

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Here’s today’s Pledge Drive capybara. I would like to apologize in advance for this.

Comments

@Scildfreja
OT, but that photo looks almost identical to the lobby of a local multiplex, save for the tables and chairs and neon sign over the entrance to the hall leading to the screens. Same colors, same layout to the snack bar. Well, except that the arcade machines were in the lobby in ours, instead of the hallway. Is it a current or former Carmike Cinema?

It’s a trivial thing, I know, but I spent a couple of years working there, and it was just so familiar looking when I saw the photo that I felt compelled to ask.

Sadly, I’m just waiting for his fanboys to start claiming that this is a false flag attack from the Left intended to discredit both Milo and the “real” (i.e., “meme teame” / troll / co-opted) alt-Right. Then again, those same people claim simultaneously that Milo is the real face of the alt-Right and that he’s not part of the alt-Right at all. Just like how Milo himself will claim any identity as long as it suits his agenda.

If some of today’s nazis showed up to one of Milo’s talks I think that the best response would be for people from our side of the culture war to protect him if they happened to be there. Some of the protesters for example. That would be the right thing to do and a powerful message.

Though I should add that I would not condemn anyone hurt by Milo that could not bring themselves to protect him. It’s not a simple issue. Experiencing consequences for actively creating such a “society” matters as much as expressing our own values.

Well, obviously, most of the alt and far right’s energies are devoted towards not becoming communists. Which really, is what they secretly want to be. But one can always delude themselves and work against their own interests I guess.

I’ve repeatedly said (here and elsewhere) that Milo needs to understand that he’s dealing with people for whom he’s a convenient shield and tool, and who loathe his guts behind his back, and he’s due Night of the Long Knives and go the way Röhm did, either abso-fucking-literally or just booted out of the show.

And this is not exaggeration for funsies and flashing Hitler cards to win, seeing how we’re talking about actual fucking Nazis here. As in, people who espouse Nazi ideology in all seriousness and who believe in fucked up Nazi shit and above all, people who are preparing for a physical confrontation, gathering means of perpetrating it and who have mentally primed themselves for a good while to commit the crimes.

@Skiriki:
I agree that Yiannopoulos as a person needs to be careful about which beds he gets into. However, I also suspect that Yiannopoulos as an idea is going to defeat Anglin for the soul of the Alt-Right.

Anglin is a loathsome, hateful little man, but he is honest and consistent, and he believes in something, wretched thought it is. Yiannopoulos believes in absolutely nothing except his ability to get away with whatever he feels like doing and to hurt whomever he wishes. He has no need to be consistent. Considering that they’re vying for the loyalty of a bunch of nihilists, I think Yiannopoulos has a decisive advantage – as his readership, followership and influence shows.

For that reason, I don’t think Ernst Rohm is an appropriate comparison. I’d argue that a better comparison might be to say that Anglin is Trotsky to Yiannopoulos’s Stalin. He’s not an angel by any means, but he’s being sidelined out of his own movement because he’s an idealist and his opponent is not.

Milo as Stalin – I can’t see him organizing a bank robbery or doing anything violent. I guess he’s ‘ordered’ the swinging of rhetorical ice-picks, but I dunno, I kinda think this type of political metaphor is stretched a little far to really be useful.

obscure historical references: Back in the day, the Revolutionary Communist Party in Russia used to fund itself with ‘expropriations’ of banks and corporate payrolls. Lenin used to call Stalin ‘his Georgian bank robber’. Years later, Stalin and Trotsky had a major feud going on and Stalin ordered Trotsky’s death – he was whacked with an mountaineer’s ice hammer.

I’m not fully certain if that’s the case — Milo’s minority status (gay, half-Jewish) does leave him very vulnerable, considering how rabid the opposition Nazi-side can be, at what point it matters not if it is the person or idea that’s attacked. Because if they take out the person, the idea will eventually get smared out as well.

The reason why I’m hoping that Milo smartens up and jettisons alt-right completely is because in recent months, we’ve had an uptick in hateful alt-right/Nazis in Finland (which fortunately led into massive protests and possibly changes in policy).

There’s a detail that people need to know and understand that it is not a joke: this particular Nazi group has a scoring system in place that awards the members for various things, including violent assault/right up murder of their enemies and going to prison for it.

They.

Literally.

Award.

Points.

For violence.

And.

Murder.

I do not know if Anglin’s gang has a system like that, but considering the cross-pollination going on between various white power/supremacist Nazi groups, it won’t be out of question. And Nazis have gotten more restless the closer we’re to election.

Anglin is a loathsome, hateful little man, but he is honest and consistent, and he believes in something, wretched thought it is. Yiannopoulos believes in absolutely nothing except his ability to get away with whatever he feels like doing and to hurt whomever he wishes. He has no need to be consistent. Considering that they’re vying for the loyalty of a bunch of nihilists, I think Yiannopoulos has a decisive advantage – as his readership, followership and influence shows.

JCfromNC – I think a lot of movie multiplexes are built from the same plan – it saves money. The same thing happens in SoCal with a certain office building plan; I worked as a temp for most of the 90s and had assignments in at least three of those identical eight-storied-two-tower-with-atrium buildings. It was kind of amusing, but then, I always knew where the restrooms were. 🙂

@Sillybill:
Stalin was a weird guy with a very interesting CV. Apparently he wrote quite good poetry, which he was later very embarrassed about and refused to let anyone read.

I agree that comparing a half-baked attention seeker like Yiannopoulos to him is unjust given Stalin’s willingness to get literal blood on his hands, but the same could be said for the comparison to Röhm. Both of them were murderers who were willing to do their own dirty work; when we compare Yiannopoulos to them it’s only in the sense of the betrayal.

@Skiriki:
Yiannopoulos could very easily be turned into a living example of everything the alt-Right hate; and this could turn into a tragedy in a heartbeat. I entirely agree with you there.

Also, Nazis fucking suck. The world should have been rid of them a long time ago. I’m sorry to hear that Finland has them too.

The impression that I have of people like Anglin, Auernheimer, Brennan et al, is that they’re only tangentially connected with the sort of Nazis who actually hurt people in real life. Make no mistake, this doesn’t make either group admirable in any sense, but it means that I refuse to be afraid of Anglin. He’s a small man who has an army of smaller people who will harass others from behind a screen of anonymity, but he’s not any sort of monster. He’s pathetic, and so is anyone who listens to him.

I think Yiannopoulos has realised this and is proceeding to eat Anglin’s lunch for that very reason.

I have no qualifications in this area, but my guess is that if you only ate popcorn for an extended length of time, you would die. So the question is, what proportion of your diet can be popcorn (provided the remainder is well-balanced) without ill effects. My guess is, if we limit the popcorn to this alt-right meltdown, and go back to a balanced diet afterwards, we’ll be ok.

Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.

A little music history: death metal was one of the inspirations for black metal. The black metalers (Varg especially) saw the “evil” aspects of death metal as too performative, too fake; the evil only happened on stage. They decided to bring that shock into the real word resulting in several church burnings and eventually murders.

I don’t know why Milo is surprised by awful people acting awfully (just like Roosh was so surprised). These misogynists project their own awful attitudes onto their enemies all the time and seem to assume everyone thinks like them, so how did they not see this coming?

Those Trump tweets just show his lack of comprehension. Clinton didn’t bring up Machado as some paragon of virtue, she brought up the former Miss Universe as an example of Trump’s misogyny. It’s irrelevant if Machado was an angel or not.

@EJ he wasn’t embarrassed about his poetry. He used to read it at sittings for his close circle (not friends; friends don’t murder friends) and actually used to personally edit poetry up to his death. He had people spared during the terror simply because he was a fan of their writing.

Stalin was a lot of things, avid reader and editer was one of them. He used to correct grammatical errors in Beria’s letters for example. He was educated in a seminary so I guess some habits never left him!

If anything it was the robberies and explosions to rob bank coaches he wanted to be forgotten. That and his damaged arm.

As to comparing Milo and Stalin…a bit of a stretch I think. Milo is more akin to Irish people that wrote for the independent in 1916 who called for the shooting of the rebel leaders. Will say anything to generate hate, frenzy and of course revenue. Milo wouldn’t want to be in power at all he just wants the biggest bully to be so he can stand on the outskirts and laugh at the bully’s victims while screaming freeze peach. He is a bully but he’s the Perkins to Trunps Dudley Dursley. (Harry Potter reference because I think of the alt right as death eaters)

While I do agree that the idea of anyone, no matter how reprehensible their positions or actions, being stalked by literal Nazis is terrifying, the primitive part of me that disconnects a visceral sense of irony from the circumstances of its creation finds it intriguing that someone who once posted a picture of his hands draped over a two-volume biography of Hitler, and who used to adopt a pseudo-German identity in order to ingratiate himself with the Nazi-leaning crowd, is being so viciously rebuffed by the group he once flirted with through the same kind of “signaling” he decries in anyone who disagrees with him. Had it remained mere words as it had been only weeks prior, I could still revel. Now I worry about the possibility of a man who despises everyone I love being harmed by people who hate us even more, and the aftermath if it does occur.

I also just read the comments on the Breitbart article – the deflection has begun. It has already been decided by a number of commenters that the threats came from the Left, feminists, BLM, or ISIS (also some convoluted “but they’re called National SOCIALIST” rationales claiming that Nazis are actually leftists anyway, so even if it’s Nazis this can’t be a matter of the alt-right eating itself).

Milo v. Nazis: The white supremacists have been working themselves up into a froth lately, several people got stabbed and beat on at that rally in Sacramento in June. Their websites talked that up as a victory, and it’s not just internet chatter. They have local groups, they they hang out at their bars, listening to their bands, and fund raise and organize rallys and get other groups to support them. The rise of T-rump and the alt-right gives them a lot of hope and opportunity.

Hopefully Anglin is full of it and Milo’s bodyguard will be bored all the time.

Trump’s high command has sought to reassure party figures, including Senate and House leaders, that there is no reason to be alarmed by the debate or by Trump’s ensuing theatrics, explaining them away as part of his appeal to the masses

The thing is, Trump’s “theatrics” do appeal to his supporters. As I’ve said before, Trump has a lock on the racist-sexist-xenophobic-old-white-guy demographic; the only significant question is whether or not that demographic, by itself, is large enough to give Trump the win.

Once when I was an underemployed 20-something I got a box of microwave popcorn from Costco and a copy of Star Control 2 for my PC. Rather than spend any money going out in the evening, I spent the night playing games and eating not much besides the popcorn. I lost a bit of weight, which pleased me.

A month later I went to donate blood, and they refused me because I’d developed anemia.

Moral of the story: popcorn won’t hurt you, but it’s not enough to live on. You also need bacon.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.